Budget Yoga Tips

     I receive emails from yoga.about.com. The yoga guide is Anne Pizer, and I often enjoy her articles. Today, I received an interesting article: Budget Yoga Tips. My favorite tip was this one:

Yoga in the home.
We have a yoga instructor come to our home each Tuesday night. My wife and I and 3 or 4 neighbors have an instructor who comes and does an hour and fifteen minute yoga class for us in our family room. We pay by the month and there is no overhead to pay. Most yoga instructors have "day jobs" and do yoga as a side. They're paid poorly but love yoga. As a group, we pay about $50 per session which is more than the "Y" pays and she's delighted to do it.
—Guest Roger Hoskin

     I don't really know enough people in DC (or have enough room in my apartment, for that matter) to make something like this worth the effort, but maybe when I move back to Pittsburgh...any takers?

A Visit to Happy Vally.

     Good afternoon, blogosphere. I've been in the lovely town of State College all weekend. On Friday, the weather was just lovely, and autumn is quickly approaching. State College is pretty much perfect in autumn--the trees are just spectacular, the football is plentiful, and the weather wavers from the rainiest, chilly days, to days of crisp sunlight and blue skies. I appreciate (and have experienced) both extremes this weekend, and I think they both have their charm. When it's rainy, State College is a great place to snuggle in with a blanket and watch the storms. It's also a great place to grab a camera and photograph the natural sublimities when the sun is sunny. You can still find places that aren't too busy in State College (even on a football weekend), and it makes me feel very peaceful. I've spent some of the best years of my life in this town, and I really love coming back.


Mt. Nittany in October

     Also, I had the pleasure of getting a new phone this weekend.



     This is the LG Dare. It has a touch screen, a 3.2 Megapixel camera, and a headphone jack for the MP3 player. Those were the three major selling points that made me like this phone. I just need to get some good ringtones into it and we'll be good to go. My phone number is the same, so don't worry about not being able to contact me. If you were able to contact me by phone before, you will still be able to do it now.

Autumn Appreciation, Day 3

     I know I said I would post about Martha Stewart next, but instead, today I must post about Better Homes and Gardens's 100 Days of Holidays. (If the link doesn't work, let me know, and I'll try to find another.) From today until New Years Day, I believe, they are sending out an email a day with ideas on decorating and celebrating. I can't think of anything better!


Sign up here!

Stuck in my head.

     File this under "stuck in my head for the last three weeks." I can keep listening to it and listening to it, but still, every day, it's there again! I chose this video because the sound quality in it was awesome.





Is true love a trip to Chinatown
Or being held in one's opium gaze
Under the peach trees
There I'll sit and wait

Is true love a long walk through Bryant park
Or being held in the month of May
under the peach trees
There I will be, will be until you come and get me

Cause I'm so tired of waiting in restaurants
reading the critics and comics alone
With a waiter with a face made for currency
Like a coin in ancient Rome

And I really do wish you were here next to me
cause I'm going to see James Dean
There I will be
Under the peach trees with him

Invitations!

     As of yesterday, all but about five of my wedding invitations are completed, and the only thing delaying their arrival at the homes of my wedding guests is the arrival of the appropriate stamps at my house. I had prematurely purchased stamps adequate for a one ounce invitation, so imagine my dismay when the invitations arrived and I weighed them--1.3 ounces! I had to purchase the required number of two ounce stamps, just to be safe. Luckily, they are both attractive:

       

     Also, of course, a bunch of wedding-themed $0.44 stamps aren't entirely useless. I needed some for the interior return-envelopes for the RSVP card, and I may need them in the future for Thank You cards. There's no problem here, then.

     I am very excited about my invites. I took the time and care to hand-label and address all 120 of them (and there are a few more to do, pending my mother's approval).



     My autumn enthusiasm is palpable, isn't it? These invitations were purchased at InvitationConsultants.com. I must admit that I was excited by seeing my fiancé's and my name over and over again. After the invites are sent out, we will be so close to go-time, it's almost scary. My wedding is on November 14, 2009, so yes, we're getting very close. This Friday, we will be taking a day off of work to travel to Pennsylvania to collect the marriage license (sidebar: I think I hate writing Pennsylvania. Why did my entire family have to live in the state? Why couldn't they live in Ohio? Or Maine? But no, over and over again, P-e-n-n-s-y-l-v-a-n-i-a! My hand gets sore just thinking about it.).

     Why did I hand-write my invitations? There are a few different reasons. One is that it just seemed so formal and domestic, two qualities that I enjoy. Another reason is that I find my handwriting attractive, especially in a formal setting. I think the entire idea of receiving a hand-written note feels so elegant and intimate. I am sure that no one else will even notice the work I put in to the invitations, but at least I will know that I wrote them to my satisfaction, and that's what's important, isn't it?

Housekeeping.

     I've had to remove my twitter feed, as it appears that the coding is erronous in returning, rather than my twitter comments, the comments of user undefined. It appears that soem part of the code returns an "undefined" result, and since there is a user named "undefined," voila! I'll keep checking back periodically to see if they repair the feed, and when they do, my tweeting shall return.

     Another thing I wanted to address is the general format of my blog. I think I'm going to post separate posts based on topic, so that when my labels are searched, there's not a hodge-podge of things to sift through to find the topic of choice. I prefer this, so it shall be done!

Autumn Appreciation, Day 2

     Today, under the topic of autumn appreciation, feast your eyes on--this!:







     This is "Zelda's Wax Museum," a lit house from the Department 56 Halloween collection.



     And this is "The Candy Cauldron." Department 56 is best known for their lighted winter holiday villages and the Snowbabies collection. Hooray! They also make houses for Halloween! This is the first step in bumping Halloween to the importance level of Christmas without the sanctimony. I think that these would make a great addition to any Halloween decor.

     Next in Autumn Appreciation will be about Martha Stewart. See you then!

Thank goodness I bought that.

     I have a grand passion for bags, but I they also give me great frustration. My optimum situation is to carry a bag back and forth to work. I'd prefer to carry a single bag that fits my lunch for the day, my coffee for the morning, and all of my purse things, which include: my umbrella, a water bottle, my keys, lip balm, hand lotion, a 50ml bottle of Evian Brumisateur (don't knock it until you try it--some days it is a life-saver), Lysol Disinfectant Spray-to-Go (public bathrooms!), a small hair brush, sunglasses (Rx or conventional), a travel shopping bag,...you get the picture. I'm so prepared, you'd think I was a boy scout.

     As you can imagine, no normal purse can handle this much crap. I truly struggle in the summer to find a solution that allows me to be prepared and not have a back ache every night. For the cooler months, though, I bought a bag back in 2007, and it's been invaluable to me ever since:



     Try hard as I might, I could not find a place to buy this specific bag. However, I would recommend Ogio products, so long as they work as well as the bag that I have. We are going on three years of usage, and this bag has been awesome. Unfortunately, I cannot use this bag year-round because of the cross-body strap. The strap likes to hold on to my right boob for dear life and makes me look a little lop-sided in a cotton tee.

     So yes, a good cross-body, fashion-forward messenger bag can really make the difference between being prepared and not being able to find your car keys in the rain.

Autumn Appreication, Day 1

     I'm going to forgo the obligatory "first post" tone and jump right into the fun stuff. Our first Autumn Appreication article is from About.com's Container Gardening Guide, Kerry Michaels.




How to make a Pumpkin Planter

     Enjoy!